The present invention relates to a public telephone set in which various cards can be used and a centralized management system.
Various types of card such as a credit card and a card in which information of a prepaid value is recorded (to be referred to as a prepaid card hereinafter) are used in conventional public telephone sets. These cards comply with the following standards.
The cards are classified into the following three types:
(1) JIS cards such as a cash card and a credit PA1 (2) IC cards (with or without a magnetic stripe); and PA1 (3) prepaid (or debit cards).
When materials, thicknesses, and elastic forces (bending rigidity) of the above types of card are compared, the cards (1) and (2) are made of hard vinyl chloride and have thicknesses of about 0.7 to 0.8 mm, while the card (3) is made of PET (polyethylene telephthalate) resin and has a thickness of about 0.2 to 0.3 mm. The card (3) generally has a lower elastic force than those of the cards (1) and (2).
Although various cards used in the conventional public telephone sets are available as described above, a conventional card processing apparatus for reading out information from a card or writing it therein is designed for only one type of card.
For this reason, in order to use these various types of cards, processing apparatuses corresponding to the number of types of cards must be arranged inside each public telephone set, and its internal structure is complicated. The telephone set itself becomes bulky.
A method of charging fees of a public telephone set capable of accepting a credit card among public telephone sets capable of using various types of cards is preferably practiced by a centralized management system based on a leased on-line network between public telephone companies and credit companies since speech data of a user must be confirmed.
In addition, since there are invalid cards due to unpaid charges or missing cards, the public telephone set capable of accepting a credit card must determine whether a currently used credit card is a valid or invalid card prior to the start of speech.
A typical conventional means for determining validity of the card is to access a credit company center at the time of calling at a public telephone set and to collate whether credit information of the currently used credit card is invalid.
In a centralized management system which confirms speech data and collates the validity of the card by using the leased on-line network, various agreements of use of the on-line network and facility investment are required to create the on-line network. For this reason, a long preparation period and a large amount of capital are required to introduce public telephone sets capable of accepting credit cards.
A conventional system which performs the above confirmation and collation and uses a public telephone network in place of a leased on-line network is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,750,201. Speech data is output for every call as described above, incurring extra line charging usage. At the same time, disputes which result from shares of the line charging usage occur among a user, a credit card company, and a telephone company.
The conventional centralized management system must check validity of the card, and a relatively long period of time is required to allow a user to speak to a callee, resulting in poor service to the user and degradation of line utilization efficiency.